Apple is planning to use a hidden feature of its iPhone software to track customers as they wander around its stores, according to reports.
Mac rumours website 9to5Mac claims that Apple is planning to install tracking devices around all its US shops.
These iSpies will use a feature of iOS 7 called iBeacon to judge a shopper's …

What do you mean "if"?

> If it migrates to beyond these walls and into my life I will not be a happy bunny.

Of course it will. First as a voluntary opt-in service where you get a discount on the products; then as a default service you can opt out of, bundled with hardware/services; finally as a fully integrated part of Google's and Apple's respective software and hardware packages.

Re: I presume...

Re: I presume...

iBeacon relies on Low Energy Bluetooth (BLE), so turning off Bluetooth would disable this feature (this information is from Apple Developer). Apple apparently preferred to use existing features such as Bluetooth instead of throwing in a NFC chip, I imagine using a different technology than Google for this was also very attractive.

Re: Right now, someone at google is screaming...

Re: Right now, someone at google is screaming...

Google can and maybe even will implement this. iBeacon is the Apple implementation of Beacon, which is an open standard that works using BLE. Paypal is the one pushing this standard, hoping to get it used for payments (so in that regard it does compete with NFC, but AFAIK Google doesn't have any particular allegiance to NFC)

Re: WOT???

Some Apple stores are pretty large, actually, spread over several floors.

Android apps can potentially make use of iBeacons just as well as Apple devices, and the use to which they will be put will be a little more imaginative than that described in your happy log, which doesn't actually seem to pay much attention to reality, in terms of the typical buyer queues that you find in an Apple store.

There are any number of reasons why it could be extremely useful for your phone to know where it is inside a building. Example: you're wandering around a museum listening to information on your phone, and proximity to an exhibit room triggers a commentary on the Exhibits App. Example: you're in the maze of a subterranean Japanese station and you need to find the exit nearest your hotel. Example: you'd like to wander into a booked cinema screening without waving tickets around. Example: you'd like a realtime map update of your location in a big shopping centre, directions. Et cetera. Et cetera.

Puzzled

I have never been into an Apple store. In fact I have never seen one and I don't even think that the nearest one in this country is less than four hours drive from here. Which is, of course, how it should be.

Anyway, I am curious as to how all this works. If I am walking around the store looking at things and their price tags would I want to have my phone beep and there's a message telling me what I now already know?

After the fitfh or six thing I am looking at and message received wouldn't I get a little tired of this? Or have I missed the point entirely?

> I have never been into an Apple store. In fact I have never seen one

Oh you've missed something. I had heard people talk about the Apple fanbase as a "cult", but I thought it was hyperbole... and then an Apple store opened nearby. I happened to walk by on the day of the opening the queue was, I'd guesstimate, about half a mile long, people had been queuing for hours, and if this had been PC buyers they would likely have been a bit testy. Not the Apple fans. No they (and this creeped me right the fuck out) were SINGING AND CLAPPING HANDS.

I still haven't been in the store; I can't shake the feeling that the salesdroids will try to hook me on Dianetics.

Wow, cool say the fools

Get a quick patent on the iPricetag, because having the price of an item beamed to your shinyphone is much cooler and definitely not more bothersome than reading it off a piece of card adjacent to said item.

But how will the shopper not currently in possesion of such a device be able to get the information they need?

And I would assume that if I needed to be informed that a broken iGadget of mine had been fixed, an easier system called email (or do they call it iMail?) would be more appropriate than having to wander round an Apple Shop (tm) with a different non-broken iGadget in order to ascertain this.

Personalized price tags?

Will the beamed price tags depend on how much the fanboi/fangurl is likely to spend today, based on an analysis of past buying habits? Will fanbois/fangurls start comparing the offers while in store? Who will clap harder: the one with the lower price or the one with the higher (presumably the more valuable customer)?

Expectation

I'd have expected the author of this article to provide the details of the iBeacon feature, how it works, what benefits it may give to either party ( the beacon deployer and the iThing user ) and what the downsides might be.

In the absence of that information, as a few others report, its a BLE solution enabling the phone to pick signals from 'beacons'. In most cases the beacons will be relatively passive, simply transmitting an identifier when another device is in range and require the phone to have an app deployed to identify the beacon. The phone would then use a web service to provide 'utility' to the user: e.g. in a store where an individual as a loyalty card & associated app installed, the individual may be 'guided' to something of interest. Even more simply, the beacon could be transmitting a URI for a cafe's free WiFi.

BLE range, at 3-4 mtrs, is much more useful than NFC.

Sure the objective is to promote (sell you) something but it's not about tracking, 'they' can do that already as you're more likely to have WiFi enabled than Bluetooth.